Sunday, November 11, 2012

Cutting the Template

I've Started to cut away at the lino to leave my print design. This is probably the most labour intensive part of the process as you tend to spend a long time doing this, hunched over the lino. I always need to take plenty of breaks otherwise my neck and shoulders hurt after a while.

I've also started messing around with colours for the background, trying to achieve some sort of dawn or dusk state. I love mixing colours from the tubes, very rarely do I use them in their pure form. It's great to play around and see the change as you add slightly more of one colour and then maybe add a third.

I've bought only a small number of colours as I like to mix them. So I stick to a range of the primary colours in both warm and cool - this gives me six. Then I add some staples like burnt umber, yellow ochre and raw sienna. Finally, I have two blacks, a rich bright black and then a dull black.

I didn't get much colour experiments done today as I left it late and then the darkness came. I now realise that I really do need to get more organised. I only have a small amount of time available and less so now that the winter has come. So, off to plan next week to make sure there's lots of printing time available.